Blue Train reveries: the Paris-to-Nice sleeper

Ticket to ride: drinkers in the bar of the Blue Train, 1950.
Photograph: Compagnie des Wagons-Lits

The Gare de Lyon is the most beautiful Parisian station: the faded green paint of its ironwork and the palm trees on the concourse suggest an aristocratic conservatory. Its Train Bleu restaurant is accessed from the concourse by an imperial (that is, double-sided) staircase. The main dining room is called the Gold Room, to deter anyone thinking of ordering a cheap snack. Even the luggage racks above the leather bench seats are gilded, and big murals depict linen-suited flâneurs and ladies in gauzy dresses frolicking in a Riviera of the late-19th century.

Even the luggage racks above the leather bench seats are gilded

I quickly walk through this room – bypassing its Menu du Train Bleu offering seven courses and two glasses of wine for €110 – and enter the more informal anteroom, where I order a glass of good Chablis for €7.50 and think historical thoughts.

In the past 18 months I have been exploring the remnants of what might be called the first, and most picturesque, form of European integration. I refer to the network of luxurious sleeper trains run from the 1880s to the 1970s by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. The best known of these was the Orient Express. On this, and any Wagons-Lits train, sleeping-car conductors had to speak at least three languages, and all notices were written in French, German, Italian and English.

Chicest of all was the Blue Train. It ran from the Gare de Lyon to Ventimiglia or Sanremo in Italy, but Nice was the principal destination.

Cheap flights and high-speed trains have killed off most of the sleepers that succeeded the W-L services, but there is still a night train from Paris to Nice, even if its operator, SNCF – currently phasing out its night trains – likes to pretend otherwise, skilfully concealing this unprofitable service in the crannies of its online booking systems. The train is no longer blue, but a French ticket clerk told me that “older people” (he made the quotes mark gesture) still call it the Blue Train. The official designation is the 21.22 Intercité de Nuit, and it will terminate for good this autumn. It no longer goes from Gare de Lyon but from Gare d’Austerlitz, just across the river. So, after my glass of Chablis (all right, after two or three glasses of Chablis) I cross the Seine.

Gare d’Austerlitz has a sort of melancholic, Sunday-ish appeal. Sparrows scuffle in the roof rafters and there’s usually a backpacker playing something bluesy on the station piano. The booking hall is far too big for the services on offer and my voice echoes as I buy a ticket. The poetic French term for a booking hall, la salle des pas-perdus (the room of lost footsteps) applies well here.

The French term for a booking hall is la salle des pas-perdus (the room of lost footsteps)

The sleeping compartments of the 21.22 – technically couchettes rather than sleepers (which means, in practice, no sink) – are rather bleak compared to the wood-panelled quarters of the W-L trains, and there is no longer a restaurant car, let alone the palatial W-L type serving cordon bleu food on gold and blue plates with crinkled edges, and napkins folded like vertical scallop shells. But the 21.22 offers many pleasures.

The first is taking possession of your sleeping compartment, accommodation described as a “little den” in TS Eliot’s in Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat. For the perfect romantic break, a €50 supplement secures two people sole occupation of a four-berth couchette, thereby recreating the erotic possibilities of the old W-L compartments, which were usually two-berths. (The racy image of the night trains was established in 1925, when Maurice Dekobra’s bestseller The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars was published. It features a femme fatale called Lady Diana Wyndham, who is determined to find “the imbecile who will cater to my whims and ripen in my safe deposit box some golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides”.)

Perhaps equip yourselves with a picnic, duplicating the railway “dinner basket” that Ada Mason purchases in Agatha Christie’s novel The Mystery of the Blue Train. Then the thing is to wake early – at 6.30 or so, when the train is passing the pretty seaside station of Cassis, which is almost overwhelmed in summer by red bougainvillea.

The guard wishes departing passengers not just a 'bonne journée' but a 'belle journée'

At Fréjus an hour later, the sea is beginning to sparkle; pastel-coloured villas and swimming pools with waterslides bring that familiar torment: why don’t I live on the Riviera? At Agay, the train crosses the Viaduc d’Anthéor, as depicted in a famous W-L poster, captioned “Summer on the French Riviera by the Blue Train” with the Blue Train as high in the sky as an aeroplane. Then it’s Cannes… Juan-les-Pins. Arrival at Nice – another aristocratic conservatory, with healthier palm trees than the ones at Gare de Lyon – is at 08.37. The train guard wishes departing passengers not a “bonne journée” but a “belle journée”.

Steaming along: the Blue Train crosses the Viaduc d’Anthéor in the famous poster.

I usually return from Nice on the fast train, the TGV. When it starts heading north along the Rhône Valley, you feel it’s about to take off. The TGV does the journey in five hours rather than 12, but I will never quite forgive it for being an accomplice in the murder of the Blue Train.

Way to goThe night train from Paris to Nice can be booked online with the SNCF, but it’s simpler to book by phone through Ffestiniog Travel on 01766 772030. There are six-berth and four-berth couchettes. Prices start at £30.50 one way in a six-berth couchette.

Night Trains: The Rise and Fall of the Sleeper by Andrew Martin is published by Profile at £14.99. To order a copy for £12.74, go to bookshop.theguardian.com